


Kookaburra Soul

by Zetared



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 15:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18166883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: Concept I - MASH with daemons.Concept II - Very rarely, traumatic experiences sometimes cause a Settled adult’s daemon to re-Settle.Concept III - Hawkeye goes into the war with a daemon in the shape of a Kookaburra bird; how he’ll leave it is anyone’s guess.





	Kookaburra Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was a Thought. I wanted to do more with it, but it is what it is!

Her name is Tamenunda, but Hawkeye calls her Menu and makes jokes about ‘daily specials’ and ‘ordering a la carte.’ She’s one of the most boisterous, talkative daemons most folks have ever met--often to Hawkeye’s social detriment; it makes one person look a bit askance at another, to be addressed directly by a man’s soul.

From the beginning, Beej takes like a duck to water to Menu’s friendly attitude. Taking his cues from Hawkeye himself, BJ also isn’t afraid to use Menu’s inherent excess of freedom to his advantage. (Bird daemons often have a better range between their human companions than other daemon species do; that’s a known fact, just like it’s ‘a known fact’ that most folks with bird daemons have a bit of witch blood in ‘em--a superstition that persists even in this modern, forward-thinking age). BJ Hunnicutt is not above using his best friend’s soul to get things done in a more effective manner, especially when Hawkeye himself sets the precedent. It’s handy, being able to send Menu ahead to hold their place in the mess-hall line or direct her to and from Hawkeye when there’s messages to be relayed across the camp and no time to go haring back and forth in person. 

Others in the camp utilize Menu in similar ways. She barks orders to the nurses on Houlihan’s behalf, provides reports from Radar when the camp intercom system goes kaput, and even carries small parcels from tent to tent upon request. She hardly ever balks or complains--even when it’s Burns--or, later, Winchester--doing the favor-asking. Menu lives to serve, for all that her human counterpart would deny it, and she becomes a regular sight around the camp--a small, long-billed bird flapping gracelessly across the sky. 

The sound of their wild, harebrained laughter, daemon and man’s, is as familiar to the ears of the MASH staff as the roar of Jeeps’ engines and the cluttering whir of incoming choppers--and if the raucous sound takes on a sharper, more hysterical edge with every passing day, no one says a word about it until it’s far too late.

It’s about six months after arriving in Korea that BJ Hunnicutt notices the changes taking place in his friend. Perhaps others who had been in camp longer than he had noticed the tell-tale signs even earlier, but it’s BJ who goes the extra mile of grabbing Hawkeye by the elbow and pulling him aside to address the matter headon.

“Hey, are you all right?”

Hawkeye, fresh off a twelve-hour stint of meatball surgery just like the rest of them, glassy-eyed and constantly yawning, just stares back at BJ with a bleary look of non-understanding. “Sure. How’re you?”

BJ shakes his head. “No. I mean. Well, look.” And he takes Hawkeye’s unresisting chin in the cup of his hand and directs the man’s eyes toward the exhausted daemon perched on the ground near his feet.

Menu’s feathers, usually tipped in a subtle spray of blue along the wings, appear brown and dull, now, as if covered in dirt. Her once long and imposing beak snubs at the tip, obviously shorter than usual, even in the dim glow of the overhead camp lights.

Hawkeye squints and purposefully puffs up his cheeks, forcing BJ’s light fingers to let go completely. “I don’t follow.”

And BJ, tired and worn through himself, decides it’s not the time to worry about it. By the time he catches up to Hawkeye and the daemon the next morning, the strangeness of the Kookaburra’s appearance has been rectified, and BJ dismisses what he had seen as a combination of sleep deprivation and bad light. Hawkeye certainly seems well enough, now.

It’s after just Hawkeye gets himself declared dead when BJ notices the oddness again. Menu, hunkered down with Hawkeye in the bus, an entirely unusual growl rising up from her little bird throat when BJ asks, sincerely, if Hawkeye really intends to leave.

Or maybe it’s after Jeep accident, after Hawkeye spends more than a day stranded and concussed in the care of an obliging Korean family. Menu appears different that night as she huddles in Hawkeye’s arms in recovery, her shape distinctly distorted, her eyes odd in her skull, too big, too sharp.

Or maybe it’s when Hawkeye’s sleepwalking starts, when Sidney Freedman pays them all a visit and then comes up to BJ and questions aloud, in a baffled voice, “Did you know Kookaburras have fangs?”

After that, it’s like a landslide of moments to BJ’s recollection, accumulating puzzle pieces, slowly creating a bigger, more frightening picture in BJ’s mind:

Radar comes back wounded from Seoul and Menu’s feathers suddenly appear all over camp, falling from her body in massive clumps of brown, leaving bare and fragile flesh behind.

They relocate by necessity into a large series of caves and Hawkeye paces inside like a caged predator, clutching an animal to his chest--an animal too large, too furry, and too prone to snarling to be mistaken for a simple, laughing bird.

It’s like a boulder on a hill, gaining speed and force, until finally, finally…

 

When BJ visits Hawkeye at the mental hospital to say his goodbyes, he sees no indication of the man’s daemon at all. When he asks after the avian, Hawkeye shrugs and gestures distractedly toward a misshapen lump lying very still under the blankets of his cot. 

“She doesn’t like it here,” he says, and leaves it at that. BJ takes him at his word, though in hindsight he’ll wish--as he wishes may things, during those last few weeks of the war--that he had pressed the issue more.

Hawkeye comes back from what he so brusquely calls “the looney bin” with a bizarre light in his eyes and an unexpected creature shadowing his heels. BJ’s the last know, all things considered (it keeps him up at night, still, when he realizes that he may well have never known, had his flight home not been rerouted as it was).

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Margaret whispers to him later, her body tense as a overdrawn suture. “Have you?”

BJ just shakes his head over and over, rendered silent in his confusion, his worry, and his fear. 

“Sidney says he’s all right, now,” Margaret adds, trying to lighten the heavy, oppressive atmosphere around them. “So it must be fine, right?”

BJ just takes another gulp of his drink and lifts one non-committal shoulder. Honestly, he doesn’t know. Possessively, desperately, he find himself reaching for the scruff of his own daemon’s neck, digging his fingernails deep into her short, spotted fur. Winnie turns her snout into his hand and licks her long, doggy tongue across his palm in silent reassurance. Unlike one now non-existent Kookabura, BJ’s daemon does not like to talk out loud in front of other human people.

Margaret, too, has her daemon cutched more tightly than usual in her arms as they sit alone in the Swamp and share what may be a final, friendly drink. Sassi, the daemon, meows in soft protest, but Margaret does not relent. 

Soon, they hear, the war will end.

BJ is starting to realize, now, that the end of the fighting will not, in fact, mean the end of the war.

“Should I call her Menu, still?” he finally asks, when he can stand the weirdness of it no longer, when the massive wall of resistance between himself and his best friend becomes too much to bear. 

Hawkeye glances over at him from his place on his own cot and smirks over the half-knitted sock in his lap. BJ can sense several large stones of the wall crumbling already, falling without ceremony and leaving large, open windows between them once more. “Sure. She’s still the same daemon, you know. Moreorless.”

BJ glances quickly at the foot of Hawkeye’s cot, where Menu curls up tight in apparent rest, her big, bushy tail resting over her large, furry snout. BJ doesn’t think for a minute that the daemon is really sleeping, but he’s willing to play along if it will make this conversation easier for all involved.

“Are there lots of coyotes in Maine?” he can’t help but wonder. He knows it isn’t uncommon for folks to Settle into daemon species that are not native to their own regions, sometimes not even to their own native countries, but the two species the man’s soul has chosen seem strange, all the same. First a Kookaburra, now this. How does Hawkeye’s soul have such a broad and worldly view?

Hawkeye keeps his attention on his knitting. “Yeah, there’s a few thousand, I think.”

They sit in silence a while before Hawkeye sighs, letting the yarn fall loosely in his lap, his eyes meeting BJ’s across the tent. “She wasn’t like that, at first. At first, after all the re-Settling, after the...after they took me to the hospital...she was something else, for a few days. I didn’t know what it was, but one of the staff did. The nurse was a Korean local, you see.”

BJ waits, patiently, but Hawkeye doesn’t elaborate. “Ok,” he sighs, eventually, “I’ll bite. What was she, at first?”

Hawkeye holds up a ‘just a minute’ finger and leans over to dig for a moment through his piled-up belongings. Amongst them is an Army-issue rucksack and from it he pulls a worn paperback book, and from its pages he pulls a folded up piece of glossy paper--obviously ripped out of an encyclopedia of some sort.

BJ frowns at the entry. “Dhole?” 

“It’s also called an ‘Indian wild dog.’ They’re a native species of canine.”

“It looks like a big fox.”

“Yeah, a bit.”

BJ reads the brief entry on the page for a few minutes before neatly re-folding the paper and handing it back to his friend. “Okay. So...why--?”

Hawkeye shrugs. “I didn’t want--we didn’t want--.” He sighs. “I didn’t care if we re-Settled. It was happening, regardless, and we certainly didn’t feel like our old self, anymore. But we didn’t want to be…branded, by this place. We couldn’t go home in the shape of something from this place. You know?”

BJ nods, though this entire conversation is utterly beyond his kin. He’s never, ever heard of a daemon re-Settling, before. Hawkeye might very well be some sort of modern metaphysical miracle, for all BJ knows.

“So you...picked?” BJ hazards, unable to keep the incredulous tone from his voice. If re-Settling wasn’t rare and profane enough, the idea of any person having the ability to pick the shape of their daemon is absolutely, certifiably insane.

Something of BJ’s thought processes must bleed through to his face because Hawkeye grins far too knowingly and says “The workings of a madman, I suppose. But, yeah. Menu and I sat down together and we just...knew that this--” he pauses to dramatically gesture toward the coyote at his feet, “--was better.”

“Do you think you could keep doing it? Re-Settling, I mean.”

Hawkeye shrugs. “Maybe, in the right circumstances. That’s what Sidney guesses this is all about--a lot of stress, a bit of trauma; according to the good doctor, human minds can go to amazing lengths to adapt to new, terrifying situations. Apparently human souls do, too.”

Menu deigns to end her ruse, then. She yawns big and wide, showing all her many sharp and deadly teeth, and stretches bodily across the expanse of the narrow cot, the beans of her paws spreading luxuriously wide. Her yellow eyes bore straight into BJ’s own and she offers him a wide, doggy grin that looks almost exactly like Winnie’s does, if a bit more intense. “Do you like our new ‘do, Beej?” she asks, as bold and obscene as ever.

BJ, used to talking to Hawkeye’s soul on a regular basis, shrugs. “It’s all right.”

“I like it,” Winnie says, abruptly. All eyes turn, shocked, toward the delicate-featured dalmation. Winnie, never one to speak aloud to anyone but BJ (and sometimes, very rarely, Peg Hunnicutt) stands her ground. “I think you look very clever, now.”

Menu huffs a bark of a laugh. “Oh, really? And what did I look like, before, if not clever?”

“Clownish,” Winnie answers immediately. “In a good way, I mean.”

Menu hops down from the cot and stalks, shifty as any scavenger species, across the floor of the Swamp. When she reaches Winnie, BJ has one painful, disorienting moment in which he is certain that the sharp-toothed, sharp-eyed coyote will attack. Instead, though, Menu leans forward and touches her dark nose to Winnie’s own softer, pinker snout. The gesture is so rife with easy affection and amusement that BJ finds himself staring at Hawkeye, his heart pounding frantically in his chest, a knot of something in his throat.

“I still laugh, you know,” Menu growls with promise.

 

Winnie ducks her spotted head and rubs her cheek against the coyote’s, forcing them to lean against each other in a clear display of doggie affection. “I bet.”

“Hawk?” BJ asks, unsure in a way that his daemon very obviously isn’t.

Hawkeye’s wide, answering grin is more genuine than its been in days.

“There’s coyotes in California, too, you know,” Hawkeye says. “Hell, they’re kind of all over the nation. Pretty invasive, as a species. They’ll wiggle their way into anything, eventually.”

BJ smiles back. “Is that so?”

Hawkeye watches the two canine daemons play together, whispering in voices too quiet, now, for the humans in the tent to hear.

“I’m all right, Beej,” Hawkeye says, after a while. “I think the only thing that could make me feel anything but sane, now, is losing you.”

“So don’t lose me,” BJ shrugs, as if it’s that simple--and as far as he is concerned, it is.

“What am I going to do? Follow you home?”

BJ laughs. “That’s how it works with dogs, isn’t it?”

Hawkeye mulls over that one for a while and nods. His grin is almost as open, toothy, and doggish as his daemons, in that moment.

“I still laugh, too,” Hawkeye says, “In case you were concerned.”

“I wasn’t,” BJ assures, crossing the length of the Swamp in a few easy steps and sinking right into Hawkeye’s open embrace just seconds after the other man opens his arms to receive him. 

And Hawkeye feels Settled, finally, in more ways than one.


End file.
